This is my keyboard. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

So I thought I was losing my mind when a simple LEFT JOIN on a new table was taking forever to complete: SELECT email FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON b.email=a.email WHERE b.email is null That’s about the simplest LEFT JOIN you can write to get all rows in a that are not in b. [...]

flickr.pandas.getPhotos is, as Kellan points out, “quirky” but awesome. It is essentially a firehose (three firehoses, actually) of realtime Flickr data updated every 60 seconds (not every 60000 seconds as the documentation seems to indicate). That means the “ling ling” firehose, for example, exposes about 172,000 photos per day. I’m still experimenting with the data. [...]

I love how the word hacker is slowly acquiring connotations of the word artist. Creating art with computers isn’t really new (depending on your definition of art), but computers are definitely being associated with art more and more. A Wikipedia entry for Hacker Artist was created in 2006. The image above is a page from [...]

I’ve been noticing lately that embedded video wasn’t showing up in my feeds in Google Reader. The video displays on the blog itself, it’s in the RSS, and Feedburner displays it in their feed preview. But Reader ignores it. And then I remembered that this problem started when I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. After a [...]

I’ve just rolled out an API for the Big Huge Thesaurus. Need synonyms? Give the free API a try.

I’ve just finished swapping out the Javascript library used on BigHugeLabs.com from Prototype/Script.aculo.us (P+S) to MooTools and I thought I’d share my reasons as well as my impressions for the benefit of any other developers thinking of following a similar path. A little background… BigHugeLabs.com allows visitors to use dozens of “toys” to make fun [...]

Dear Rookie Web Developer, I had the task recently of taking over a project from a group of developers (who shall remain nameless) who were unable to finish it. When I saw what they had written, I could see why. The project had clearly been assigned to inexperienced, junior-level developers who did not have the [...]